1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to speech recognition and more specifically to masking words in a speech recognition language model.
2. Introduction
Speech recognition systems, such as those used for a nationwide business directory, typically rely on language models which are extremely large and can include millions of business names, street names, people names, and all addresses in the country. Such language models have poor discrimination properties, allowing too many alternative recognition outputs. One prior art approach creates smaller language models for a number of particular geographical areas, for example, but this approach can lead to consistency problems when some of the areas overlap or when a particular entry is updated in one language model but not in another. Further, it is not possible in practice to support more than one large language model because the computational expense of searching through more than one large language model quickly becomes prohibitive.